In the last two decades, a variety of scholars has examined the rise, persistence, and decline of regions and regionalism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. They have explored how Europeans' regional loyalties coexisted, complemented, and competed with those to the nation-states that came to dominate the continent by the mid-twentieth century. Christopher Fischer's study of Alsace adds to this literature, examining how Alsatians expressed regional belonging under both German and French rule between 1870 and 1939. He examines how Alsatian cultural and political leaders used regionalism to position themselves and their constituencies within two distinct nation-states, adapting their strategies to shifting political, social, and economic circumstances.

Alsatian leaders in the German Kaiserreich and in interwar France employed many of the same strategies as their European contemporaries for defining the relationships of regional communities to the larger states and nations to which they belonged. They launched a cultural renaissance that produced Alsatian-dialect theater, Alsatian journals, regional associations, and ethnographic museums. They formed political parties and alliances to promote regional interests. And they participated in debates about schooling, linguistic practice, and historical memory. Fischer examines these activities, focusing most of his attention on the 1890s and the 1920s, to show how Alsatian regionalism shaped how Alsatians themselves interacted with the French and German states, and how those states conceived of Alsace.

Alsatian regional advocates adjusted their strategies to changing political and economic circumstances. Between German unification in 1871 and the French annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1918, Alsatian cultural leaders used the idea of regional distinctiveness to critique German rule, implying that they had more affinity to cultured France than to provincial Germany. At the same time, regionalist politicians lobbied for greater autonomy within the German Reich—an effort to put Alsace on equal footing with other German Länder. World War I soured many Alsatians toward Germany, and when France took control in 1918, people celebrated in the streets. But Fischer suggests that this did not imply unconditional popular support for French rule. Alsatians soon discovered that they missed Germany's federal system, which recognized some regional rights. Furthermore, they objected to French government efforts to impose French language use in schools and civil service, a requirement that meant many Alsatians lost civil service jobs and were replaced by French citizens from outside the region. French assimilation policies rankled both for practical reasons and because they were strikingly similar to the Germanization campaigns Alsatians had objected to under German rule.

Tensions between Alsatians and the states in which they lived were in part a product of states' and nationalists' distrust of Alsatians' regionalism, which did not clearly coincide with national and state loyalties. The German government questioned Alsatians' loyalty to the state before 1918, granting the region many fewer rights than other Länder until 1911 and embracing rumors of numerous Alsatian deserters from the German army during World War I. The French government used the war to win popular support among Alsatians. But in the 1920s and 1930s, French officials and the French press suggested that Alsatians might be working with Germany against France.

German and French officials distrusted Alsatians in part because it was hard to pin down what Alsatian regional identity meant. As Fischer argues, Alsatians remained highly divided according to social class, language, and religion, divisions that shaped their assessment of their region and the states in which they lived. On the one hand, this hampered the creation of a unified regional political platform, although Fischer describes several attempts to create one. On the other, it meant that whatever the dominant political mood of the moment, suspicious government officials could always find someone who advocated regional separatism or affiliation with the other state.

Fischer shows how Alsatian regionalism developed and changed between 1870 and 1939. Less clear is how this story adds to our understanding of European regionalism more broadly. Fischer argues that states' demands that Alsatians change their political loyalties with shifts in geopolitical power makes Alsace an especially complicated case of regional and borderland identity in Europe. It would be interesting to see him engage with a wider European historiography on regionalism and borderlands to examine this claim more fully. Certainly governments and nationalists questioned the loyalties of borderland and multilinguistic populations in the Prussian east/Poland, in western Russia/Poland/the Soviet Union, in Bohemia/Czechoslovakia, in Tyrol, and in Transylvania in the same period he discusses.

It is also striking how limited a role nationhood and nationalism play in Fischer's narrative. This could be in keeping with recent historiography on regional identities. Scholars such as Pieter Judson, Jim Bjork, and others have not only challenged the assumption that nationalism was always the primary organizing principle in Europe's German-speaking Europe before World War I, but have also shown that even when German nationalists tried to shape regional politics and cultures, they did not necessarily assume that German national identity implied affinity with the German state. Yet Fischer seems to regard the German and French nations as interchangeable with the national states of Germany and France. Unfortunately it is not clear whether Alsatians also considered states and nations one and the same. When Fischer does discuss nationalists, it is sometimes unclear who these people were: were those in the Kaiserreich all regional outsiders, or did they include pro-German Alsatians? Fischer shows that Alsatian regional identity could serve as a means of integrating into a state, or of disrupting state loyalty. Was it also a potential complement or alternative to national belonging?

Alsace to the Alsatians is a useful addition to the historiography of German and French administration of Alsace-Lorraine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and as a case study of German and French regionalism. Scholars interested in the larger questions of how multilinguistic regions and borderlands developed and changed with the advent of nation-states will find it a valuable example of how modern nation-states' claims of unity have proven complicated in practice.